Naming rights ? and wrongs

When Northern Rock Plc stumbled into financial embarrassment in September, it wasn’t only the sub-prime mortgage market that was called into question; the organisation’s misfortunes were vested with pathos by its name.

A northern rock should be something like the Cow and Calf (pictured), the brooding millstone grit boulders that overlook Ilkley Moor; not a rock as transitory as the variety found in the game with paper and scissors. To be fair, there was a solid history to speak of: Rock Building Society was a century old when it merged with Northern Counties Building Society in 1965 to form the group that demutualised a decade ago. But perhaps they aren’t making rocks like they used to. After all, Rockhampton’s own The Rock Building Society, founded in 1967 and listed in 1991, has found itself under pressure even in the year of its anniversary. 'Forty Years and Still as Solid as a Rock’ boasts its new symbol: yet it’s had to cope with a recent profit slump, an unhappy major shareholder Darryl Fennell keen to turn the board over, and a restless annual meeting.

Traditionally, there have been three ways of christening a company: the name of the founding individual; the location of the chief productive area; the entity’s key product or commodity. Some names, frankly, suit companies rather better than individuals. Tyre giant Bridgestone has the resonance worthy of a market leader, but it’s simply a translation from the Japanese of the surname of its founder, Shojiro Ishibashi.

When, just occasionally, someone aims a little higher, there is always the risk of a dicing with irony. Consider Pyramid Building Society. The legend is that its founder, accountant Graham Farrow, liked the name’s monolithic ring so much in December 1959 that he presented it to his board with only one alternative: 'Volcania Building Society’. It was chosen by default. If hubris’s meeting with nemesis was staved off 30 years, a pattern of eccentric management might have been established even then.

There are a variety of reasons not to seek the staid familiarity of, say, Smith Industries, or Consolidated Consolidations. One might be seeking to proclaim one’s ambitions. In 1913, for instance, get-ahead Ohian Tom Watson Snr fell out with and was fired by John Patterson, his mentor at National Cash Register. Watson acquired a rival company called Computer Tabulating Recording, and cocked a snook at Patterson by renaming it International Business Machines: a subtle improvement on each word in National Cash Register. In his lifetime, Watson’s company grew to 72,000 employees, each with a copy of the company songbook containing such titles as like Hail to the IBM and Ever Onward.

Alternatively, one might be articulating a new strategy, such as the former Bank of New South Wales when it merged with the Commercial Bank of Australia in October 1982. To relaunch the combined entity, it hired branding guru Pieter Huveneers, who embodied the bank’s avowed intent of dominating the Western Pacific with the name Westpac: the name has considerably outlasted the strategy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: Qantas would hardly be so valuable had it remained the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd.

One also, of course, might be seeking an authority that isn’t really there. The genre classic here, as it were, is the National Safety Council. Its messianic chief executive John Friedrich did not give it its name; but he used it like a trophy and a talisman, even being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for its services to the areas of industry safety and search and rescue.

National Safety Council sounded awfully like an arm of government; in fact, it was a private, non-profit company limited by guarantee set up in 1927 under the auspices of the Royal Automobile Association of Victoria. It had no shareholders, only members: 41 of them, private bodies such as chambers of manufactures, each represented on the council by an unpaid nominees. And as Trevor Sykes remarks in The Bold Riders (1994), this made the organisation acutely susceptible to Friedrich’s depredations: “When there are 41 people in charge, nobody is in charge.”

A tell-tale sign should have been the resignation in January 1986 of the NSC’s chief accountant Ian Matthews: he had lost confidence in the financial statements being published. As it was, not for another three years, by which time the NSC’s liabilities exceeded its assets by $200 million, were serious questions raised about its structure and viability. Its collapse exposed a familiar retinue of red-faced lenders – State Bank Victoria, State Bank of South Australia, Elders Finance among others – none of whom would survive the 1980s intact.

Banks, nonetheless, have no monopoly on credulity. A hundred thousand Australians forking out between $4000 and $55,000 attended seminars of the National Investment Institute, Henry Kaye’s mighty machine of wealth creation – at least for himself.

The NII: it sounded so respectable, so venerable. And the all-action Kaye was a guru cut from the cloth of Elmer Gantry in Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant novel: “It was inspiring to explain before dozens of pop-eyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand '¦ fifty thousand '¦ a million a year, and all this by the wonder power of suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-Shine.”

More pretentiously, Kaye offered “the knowledge”: the “secrets of property investment that the rich have but keep to themselves”. But like Gantry, who “did very well at Prosperity, except that he couldn’t make a living out of it”, Kaye crashed and burned, leaving behind $60 million in debt, and regulators in panting pursuit.

Claims to antiquity or authority are fewer and further between in these neophiliac times. Not only is it becoming harder to describe exactly what one’s product is, but even the nature of location has taken a pounding in a communications world without a centre.

Consider some of the elusive and allusive names unveiled during the dotcom boom, where Netscape, Yahoo, Excite and AltaVista were just the beginning, often with the affectation of a lower case letter at the beginning: eBay, eToys, eMerge, iBeam, iGo, iVillage, iManage, uBid, autobytel, drugstore, drkoop. And perhaps never in history have so many companies been launched starting with V: Verizon, Verity, Verio, Verisign, Versata, Viador, Vicinity, Vignette'¦

It may have represented a paradigm shift in industry; the dotcom boom certainly proved a paradigm shift where the naming of companies was concerned. How else to explain a Lucent that doesn’t make lights, an Amazon not remotely connected to South America, and a Google that was originally a misspelling? And who knows? The Rock may in time make a comeback – providing it is spelt rOc.